Political SciencePolitical Sciencehttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/702015-03-04T00:12:21Z2015-03-04T00:12:21ZEstimating Intra-Party Preferences: Comparing Speeches to VotesBENOIT, KENNETH RICHARDhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/733782015-03-03T15:05:13Z2015-01-01T00:00:00ZEstimating Intra-Party Preferences: Comparing Speeches to Votes
BENOIT, KENNETH RICHARD
Well-established methods exist for measuring party positions, but reliable means for es-
timating intra-party preferences remain underdeveloped. While most efforts focus on es-
timating the ideal points of individual legislators based on inductive scaling of roll call
votes, this data suffers from two problems: selection bias due to unrecorded votes, and
strong party discipline which tends to make voting a strategic rather than a sincere indi-
cation of preferences. By contrast, legislative speeches are relatively unconstrained, since
party leaders are less likely to punish MPs for speaking freely as long as they vote with the
party line. Yet the differences between roll call estimations and text scalings remain es-
sentially unexplored, despite the growing application of statistical analysis of textual data
to measure policy preferences. Our paper addresses this lacuna by exploiting a rich fea-
ture of the Swiss legislature: On most bills, legislators both vote and speak many times.
Using this data, we compare text-based scaling of ideal points to vote-based scaling from
a crucial piece of energy legislation. Our findings confirm that text scalings reveal larger
intra-party differences than roll calls. Using regression models we further explain the dif-
ferences between roll call and text scalings by attributing differences to constituency-level
preferences for energy policy
PUBLISHED
2015-01-01T00:00:00ZThe Dimensionality Of Political Space: Epistemological And Methodological ConsiderationsBENOIT, KENNETH RICHARDhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/696372014-06-17T02:02:38Z2012-01-01T00:00:00ZThe Dimensionality Of Political Space: Epistemological And Methodological Considerations
BENOIT, KENNETH RICHARD
Spatial characterizations of agents’ preferences lie at the heart of many theories of political competition. These give rise to explicitly dimensional interpretations. Parties define and differentiate themselves in terms of substantive policy issues, and the configuration of such issues that is required for a good description of political competition affects how we think substantively about the underlying political space in which parties compete. For this reason a great deal of activity in political science consists of estimating such configurations in particular real settings. We focus on three main issues in this article. First, we discuss the nature of political differences and from this construct an interpretation of the dimensionality of the political space needed to describe a given real setting, underscoring the essentially metaphorical and instrumental use of this concept. Second, we contrast ex ante and ex post interpretations of this dimensionality. Third, we illustrate potential hazards arising from the purely inductive estimation of political spaces using a spatial example from the physical world and political competition in the European Parliament as a political example.
PUBLISHED
2012-01-01T00:00:00ZWhy do citizens assent to pay tax? Legitimacy, taxation and the African StateD'ARCY, MICHELLEhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/674472014-04-29T04:23:17Z2011-01-01T00:00:00ZWhy do citizens assent to pay tax? Legitimacy, taxation and the African State
D'ARCY, MICHELLE
PUBLISHED
2011-01-01T00:00:00ZCredible Enforcement before Credible Commitment: Exploring the Importance of SequencingD'ARCY, MICHELLEhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/674462014-04-29T02:21:40Z2013-01-01T00:00:00ZCredible Enforcement before Credible Commitment: Exploring the Importance of Sequencing
D'ARCY, MICHELLE
States that are both strong and democratic are the most capable of delivering human development. Existing rational choice accounts of collective action and credible commitment have provided us with the answer as to why this is the case: effective social order depends on the ability of the state, as the external enforcer of collective agreements, to monitor compliance and punish free-riders (credible enforcement) and that the state is constrained to only act in the collective good (credible commitment). However, what these fundamentally static accounts do not provide is answers to the question of how credibly constrained Leviathans emerge, and how the two processes ? of the ac- cumulation of power and the constraining of power ? interact over time. We make a theoretical contribution by presenting a dynamic model of the state which shows that the sequencing of these two processes lead to fundamentally different outcomes. Specifically, we argue that while credible enforcement before credible commitment (i.e. democratizing after the state has become strong) can lead to a constrained Leviathan, credible commitment before credible enforcement (i.e. democratiz- ing before the state has become strong) cannot. We illustrate the theoretical argument with two con- trasting case studies of Ireland and Sweden. Our conclusions suggest that what matters for benefi- cial social outcomes is not democracy per se, but the timing of democracy in state development.
PUBLISHED
2013-01-01T00:00:00Z